Word Is Seeking Poetry, Prose, Poetics, Criticism, Reviews, and Visuals for Upcoming Issues

Word For/ Word is seeking poetry, prose, poetics, criticism, reviews, and visuals for upcoming issues. We read submissions year-round, but issue #31 is scheduled for March 2018. Please direct queries and submissions to:

Word For/ Word c/o Jonathan Minton 546 Center Avenue Weston, WV 26452

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Word For/ Word is open to all types of poetry, prose and visual art, but prefers innovative and post-avant work with an astute awareness of the materials, rhythms, trajectories and emerging forms of the contemporary. Word For/ Word is published biannually.

Jonathan Minton, Editor

ISSN 2159-8061

Logo Design by Dolton Richard www.wordforword.info

WF/W: Issue 30 (2017 September)

Table of Contents

Poetry / Evan Gray Janis Butler Holm Anne Gorrick Lana Bella D. E. Steward Arkava Das Mark Dow Robyn Art Jeff Harrison Leslie Seldin Mark Young Arpine Konyalian Grenier Raymond Farr Raphael P. Maurice Darren Demaree

Visual Poetry / Michael Basinski and Ginny O'Brien Matthew Klane and Justin Edward Moore Scott Helmes Barbora and Tomas Pridal Rebecca Eddy Jim Andrews Dan Dorman Sacha Archer J.I. Kleinberg Danika Stegeman LeMay

Special Feature / Translations from the French by Sabine Buchet

Review / Rich Murphy on W. Scott Howard

Evan Gray

from THICKETS SWAMPED IN FENCE COATED BRIARS high grove tree-line dancing figures hallelujah translated in rain showers

wind tattered jazz curdled milk in the fridge honeybees living in bird’s nest moon again lonesome bleak tractor bucket bellied up

12-gauge shell littered land horizon lines outshine the flood light

art thou or aren’t thou fiddle tunes lichen on brick facing hedge grass

fingernails blooded tooth aching that old hymn you remember Evan Gray

Where the Willow Hangs Down barbed wire fence empty visions city folks wind chimes conversation translated AM radio static just behind the timberline just behind the shadows of a shed town is reflected jade green moss north side of a tree a foot from planted daffodils

Evan Gray

Slang a thorn bush behind hog pins high strung in starkness the right pair of boots & the holler’s backdoor coves my flannel shirt pockets cover the beehives 1965 half-dollar dad gave me, buy gas, take a mouthful of snuff hide in the house when J comes over drunk scrabble in the porch light, in the perch, window stains I leave the doors locked remember, the mountains, ridges BBQ chip bags, fishing off the bridge, origins just pure like lady liberty, a shoebox, hand-me-down sweaters and cattails tall as people a six pack by the bookshelf, take to the cold alter, now a in fenced-in field, with my self-portrait for backdrops, blackberries along the parkway rough work with words and taxidermy plastered lynx fur or mason jars filled with kerosene, postcards in furnaces black smoke it’s the road, silver pine riddles along burger king boxes, maybe a blacksnake, there, six goats and four hens that were bought cheap even the tiniest crumpling diabetes toes in unison dancing, hammering seven nails in a row whisker closet to each other, vertebras knuckling, damn this liver, lonesome failures to lift the tractor bucket as sacrifice, for now God is a stuck hog or a lamb or another blacksnake, feeding on the mice out, the barn, most of all bottom feeders, bent stakes and glass shards flatpicking breaks, a melody, a rebirth, a cesspool, no new eyes to feel with rain-puddle clouded ecosystems just white chalky connections or dust on my dashboard, readiness it takes certain ancient eyes to call things, specific before the corn comes, upward there will be grass where home is infected by sky-red vapors, gravel throated enigmas, bless my heartstrings for feeling, lantern light wooded has become rust suspended in air like cardboard cutouts, the once seen mountains, jaspering left and right, bone deep, fingernails shards of highway lines on, ordinary thought is underground, paved rivers vibrating, I wanted to say, out the front door to leave, only spaces

Evan Gray

Basho paths clattered by patterns, alone incomplete by slants of lights I am left standing and shining through, an echo reversing gravity, by falling upward & around I cry for truths or depths floating on the surface, here are skulls, here are heads of deer cut off, I am inland where mountains shimmer and the temperate forest rots.

Evan Gray

Winter, 2013 toes numb to the earth stomped fibers of my hair tucked in his hat I didn’t even like

this all near the hill where my grandfather is buried but I only knew his cold body lying on a hospital bed while a machine breathes for him, it’s a hospital mom says, a cold metal slab, and I thought we were in the basement, but I don’t remember coughing because of mold which I am allergic to or being scared from the lack of sunlight which used to affect me, but inside I remember looking at my grandfather’s eyelids and eyebrows, how pink and purple

but that’s just it, the deer through my scope, he and I were breathing the same hard syllables just a doe, the last of the season

I needed to kill something I needed or I’d wait all year if got another chance and I didn’t do it and throw it on the bed of his pick-up take it to the high school parking lot and show everyone to see what would they think, what they’d say and goddamn I was cold snow was creeping in my tennis shoes not camo but bet everyone else had a deer by now

Janis Butler Holm

Sound Poems (from Rabelasian Play Station) I

The Presidential piston ring transfigures cloven laudanum.

The Presidential cottonmouth exposes hirsute whirlygigs.

The Presidential flügelhorn discomfits leather godliness.

The Presidential riding whip subpoenas buckram epitaphs.

The Presidential tuckahoe looks down on seismic barnacles.

The Presidential bacon fat complains of wooded pilferage.

The Presidential helium makes do with zingy cuttlebones.

The Presidential showerhead remodels talking cherryade.

Creeping eruption at ultrahigh frequencies presages mirth. Bare-handed locker rooms gasify elder tricks; protean taxables paint the town red. All things considered, does petty cash bombinate?

Judging from aquifers, who has fouled out? Skittish ejection seats jeopardize bladderball, sweetly apprenticing low-lying shrubs.

III

The Presidential underpass is picketing your dancing shoes.

The Presidential circus troupe is rallying your octothorpe.

The Presidential parapet is mortgaging your beanbag chair.

The Presidential weathercock is curdling your take-home pay.

The Presidential chloroform is welcoming your lightning rod.

The Presidential teeterboard is honoring your puddle duck.

The Presidential firing range is narrowing your superscript.

The Presidential dramaturge is summoning your goldenbush.

Daughterly bivouacs nourish rhinoscopy, flattering toads. Counterintelligence wrestles with waffle mix; uniform density liquidates fluff. Now that alternatives cuddle the great again, whom shall we torture with aureate math? By means of engrossment and color-wheel gum boots, flowering nutmeg abhors politesse.

The Presidential endocarp surmounts a raucous likelihood.

The Presidential minus sign procures a gelded watersport.

The Presidential currycomb relieves a barking noodle dish.

The Presidential kettledrum outranks a churlish overshoe.

The Presidential holding cell disowns a fulsome interphase.

The Presidential fingerprick employs a cosmic duffle bag.

The Presidential jolly boat unveils a squiggly hammerlock.

The Presidential vacuum tube assists an orange free-for-all.

Anne Gorrick

The movie is broken (after worksheet of Lynn Behrendt’s first book titles – as suggested by Google)

Of course lions dance, my bright little star You’re still single You can pay me back in gum You can call it love or thunder Her pearls drink milk in the dark Can Calphalon go in the oven? Can call of duty zombies be beat? Fake calla lilies and fake chickens Sleep lyrically wraps spring Her lupus, her Lucky Strikes, her lumineers She is branded by luck Luminarc, landscapes marketed by radiant mystery Luminous fish effect, whiskey park, wheelworks A tiara of molecular substance Which is bigger? Better? An example of Is Kevjumba a heterosexual bear wrestler? Is Banksy Jewish, gay, white, black, pregnant or contagious? Is beer vegan? Is beautiful a curse or a noun? The hard part of Burgundy is beach bum tanning on Stranger TV Burnout lasers: a synonym for skin, a southcloud The Beautiful Soup Theater Collective The odd rubies in female interest, infectious diseases, frostwire Otterbox and desert cities What’s another word for Sunday? Idioms, Iditarod, the ideal weight of her identity I need some prank, I need cute hair, I am Number 4 I used to be fat and I had a dream that I was love From Prada to Nada I pulled a muscle loving you Basement wilderness, the warpwoods, horoscope The ethnic aesthetics of consumption I really love my bank commercial, I really like you in Korean Long words, light periods, lame jokes Birth control running shoes quotes – this is why we’re fat Her bones begin this sentence Tattoos, abortions, ma pêche – How expensive is Plan B? Her vocabulary is made of metal and foam – her vocal range was like a farm Heated driveways exhale in Tokyo Which elements can expand their octet? Can you freeze milk? Can you get mono twice?

You find yourself in a room, but you forgot the blueberries You find a ticket on the dash and you collide You find yourself in the middle of a frozen lake

She eats a way back burger Spasms splash succulent surgery fusion suction Maplestory Greek letters sewn together wrong Her eyelashes were sewn on Books nurse scorned timber, beloved as the sky Scorned Woman Hot Sauce The gold he sought in translation Throwing knives and throwing up blood: there’s a wolf assassin in Togetherville Parts of speech pitchfork sets of attraction Perfect harmony performed by intruders Personal Christmas ornaments, personality disordered Personal oxygen bar and oracle Inordinate ladies origami-ed together The anatomy of angels must be comprised of plant cells What is an “I” word to describe you? Hourglasses and alcoholics and errata Organisms that reproduce asexually have the ability for their exoskeletons to benefit agriculture Is this poem an event that decreases the behavior that precedes it? Event mining, the mimic octopus This sentence is camouflaged in adaptation presocial and post-colonial, mockery and hybridity Darkness symboled in lyric, her sadness splitscreen Splice comma splice, sunlight in miniature Splintered adjective, splintered light, splintered angel The history of wood is bone A soundtrack to sincerity, broken white lines

Cohesion and coherent light Poems are temporal oscillations His breath: a monochromatic light, a temper trap The sun over a New York deciduous forest The sounds in Shrubland: this sentence and its soundclouds Lyrics soaked with screaming, snoring, throwing up Insects, questions, birds, things Some of us never die Some odd rubies came running Some quadrilaterals are rectangles Drug antagonists, property anxiety, some weirdness termed “fundamental” The physics of solace, theories entangled in their jumping I am your radio slave, your repairer, your radiation pressure noise I am your radiant history of the sea Irradiance, their ashes as seen on TV Summary, Sparknotes, text, gavotte Walk to class at a constant speed

Do your scars wait for god? Or makeup for monsters? Or you for my theory of the dead man? If you were meant for me, then you won’t feel a thing You wanted to be a memory I cast shadows in your interrupted lyrics Saturdays flirt in Italian Shoes and skin sleep in a Tokyo hotel Apricot scatter, obituary obscura Scattered order adjusts terminology Muscle, fracture, asymptote, angles, exercises, strategies These lines strain at definition Thrust fault, thoracic spine, mountain goats, love chords Throwing and thinking inside a cathedral The yellow pages tell her that this is the year of the rabbit Evershade, explosions in the sky When the phone is an experiment in international living Is aspirin a verb? Astronomy? Performance art as an intervention in probability Her beetroot utopia, a sheltered logic for pigs Silvercyst, oatmeal, gold in suspension, osmotic pressure Underworld, undertone, underoath, undercovers Under the pressure of darkness Suspicion, dishwater, silk, spinning lights His shoulder blades under spiritual construction Alcohol and ghosts: Spirits-A-Go-Go Animal spirits are a bestiary of the commons A bivalent chromatin structure marks Does she make pearls in her shells? Her oyster ligaments draw and dredge Look up in your dream dictionary shutters and sunlight An intolerable blue gloss on his marvelous arms Morning glory, the morning after pill, sickness and ratings Endless engagement rings in their enchanted leaning The entropy of dogs, their uncertainty principal, their fortunetelling gravity Our dependency on code and the color blue on the unreachable, unreadable calendar Wait for the Royal Caribbean unicorn attack Oranges, orchids, roses, origami, order, origin Our sorting technologies appall They’re swaggerific, capable of swallowing a knife Swallow your gum, or swallow the sun or stones a fishbone, a tooth, a pint of blood, a battery until your ears pop, dagger vomit, ear heart Cherry blossom the hollow Get on the Peter Pan bus Bring your frost emblems and your prehistoric terror

Microtonal Accidental Font (after my own poem “Microtones” – as suggest by Google)

A variable that is manipulated by the scientist in an experiment Structural adaptations that equal character A variation on the powers of 10, or for the word “sleep” Let’s swap veins The calculus in a Korean folk song or a Shaker melody Kernel sentences informed by Rilke, Hayden, Paganini, Denise Levertov Musical chairs, missionaries, mac n’ cheese, mimosas Servitude to moonlight and the morality of rain Monogamy interpolated, my monolingual fears Formula closure, mono sets, quantile and convex functions Monologue, monotype, the likelihood ratio for love Anthropologists are participant observers, revelators The autobiography is also an alphabet game Martyrology, dust canters, horseradish, cloudy eye Leap over your own meals Horse chestnut extract prancing, funny or die Ladybugs, the ground folds up with meaning, flaxfault From pimp stick to pulpit, memory foam remembers The shattered sun hoards artifacts, we celebrate islands The ascent of money as a character in world history Ascetic glitches, ascension packs a punch wrapped in tissue paper Easter Egg Island golf course, zombie tourism

Are we really protected from accidental deletion?

Even the flowers these days are professional Remember that time when that fat man was dropped? Thatched, that free thing softly under Christmas Fountain texting, a thesaurus cracks open in the wrong hands Our Atlantic senses fail, that intolerable gloss That skinny Scottish mist, the sea burns with forgetting The codeine seas, the grasslike uncertainty in sea monkeys Glide density, dislocation models crystal grain boundaries The motion in metals, in brittle fracture The sheer force of a reckless bureaucracy Arcane prankster munchies, aromatherapy as a substitute or London The belly becomes the crib, a basket of sun Lyrics hang around your neck, your handwriting has no tears in it All arms around you, Halloween Alaska Inkheart, godfont, pleated with Pleaides, skindex Poppies know the pleasure of being robbed, of flinching An invaded suffering, obscurity, open water Please touch my museum, our hands are oracles In operant conditioning an organism learns Skin splitting open, the structure of infection A template of classes, her cirrus dress The sun warms the earth by convection Constellations by constructivism Demotivational, decorations darken a room, demonoid Breast cancer defines its own accessibility Why isn’t there a love defibrillator? Insanity benefits technology Define “irony.” Define “leadership.” Define “culture” The defenestration of this poem in relation to others The midline of the body, paper buttons, plateaus Pies and Thighs, Crimecraft next to the Piercing Pagoda Cartilage or orchid, zombie spacecraft or wasting syndrome Does god choke on these situations? Text citations for “Silence: the Musical” Voodoo and the brain, loss is a voice recognition system Tangled news of a distant ascension Which voices are never used in cantatas? Arousal theory, a family of words, eyelashes both positive and false Dichotomy in falsetto, prophets in pretense and forensics Feathering her fear of long words are: clowns, heights, god, death, failure, snakes, intimacy, plastic bags, plane crashes There are plenty of fish at the Hunger Games Summoning small continents, backsplash burn-treatments, seabelly treasures the speed of thought, the space taken up by an object or a window When a spirit takes over your body Overspiritualizing over spilled milk, a moonless heartbreak her spiral curls, how to cross over spirits, the light over Norway Spirit jailbreak, grace wasted on excess capacity, slanted Lamentation an idiom for fitted sheets, fortune cookies, retraction Turtled to death, the bejesus twist, smokewagon Threadless, a foreign object circulates in the blood Fish an animal, fox a dog, frog a reptile, fetus a person Double spaced food poisoning, the structure of this space Avalanche, indigo directions, how wind is a discography A funeral of hearts, cypress cognates, crooked vultures The pleasure of objectification is an invalid The chanterelles have changed their address

When Nietzsche wept and New York was Irish (after my own poem “An Envelope Full of Music/A Contingent Event” – as suggested by Google)

When not to use a hand sanitizer, or go to China, or order fish When notating pitch, when notated music was invented Notational velocity, notated clothing Cheap flights for Chinese New Year The execute permission was denied the object He expects her to chase him, that Gregor Mendel Year of the Rabbit, reddish brown Reddish urine, reddish brown hair, reddish egret with textual evidence: lamp, paper, theory Technique Tuesday Florence and the Machine flourished in copperplate Or a few dollars more, or a woman like you, or a gringo like me or a reasonable facsimile thereof, or a beautiful nightmare Hero or tyrant, law or theory, look or touch, a grass or a tree, a skill or a talent Evening dresses, everyday food, Eventbrite Sevendust, small animals walk through their definitions, bodies found in a trunk in Arizona Bodies found in a hollow tree reveal their motion in water Cry for water, a silvered oiled glory Traces of your friends fracture and the favored mind When your computer sleeps and notifications appear When will a crocodile eat the sun? When a couple breaks up, when cows lie down, when a single syllable cannot be solved A comparison of two numbers by division When prose accommodates action his composition would almost always end with a hero, smoking

An atmosphere of bones and notebooks, her Venus bones A synonym perceives itself as warm and caring It’s always sunny and deductible in Philadelphia When a wedding is like a jungle filled with candy

Aerobic respiration over the sea, chaos is a way to acknowledge her partiture An orca pulls a Sea World trainer to her death Harm harmonizes with her hair Trail patterns, manipulations Her mouth without tears like a party favor Paralyzed man implant, the shape of hands She bathes in snakes and snapdragons What is the prince’s name in Snow White? Leopard Ice Cream predicts that some reality shows are entirely fake Expressibles, extreme couponing Use “homemade firearms” in a sentence Benign positional vertigo, an album of competitive advantage One of Satan’s autobiographies is called “Ice” Collective bargaining for nouns Prayer collects blood from the head and arms Collect tropics, transient failure, the disease that slips inside pictures Cherubs are born and then they are rented or bought A thousand clowns and the way each one will die What is that thing next to your blood vessel? Things that end with the letter D Engadgeted and enchanted, her heart enlarged by blonde matters Enlivened by the mystery of rock powders She is a borderless blonde instrument Fat calculators, magic calculators Salt glow hives, hidden object games, sallow and inappropriate Pandora’s bracelets, cloud virgins, sea rays The Swedish coastline sways in the summer breeze, septic Drowned wolf swag, their auras wickedly melded together Atonement rises like a mystery vacation River salon, there were slots in her decisions A traversal creates pairs of slipping fish Chariots pale as character actors, the orientalism of living things Types of turquoise and the misuse of spiritual gifts Behaviors of the gifted and their properties of gold A skilled use of hydrogen, the misery of bubbles and time An experiment with magnets and eggs at a science fair What to do at home with light? Christ recycles minerals, Siamese fighting fish work on memory Patterns of arrangement, grain the size of lyric An emergent severity index Dragonoid chance, de-Cocteau this caring bridge Complete the table for this metabolic equation Wooden hearted poems canceled in full episodes Notational velocity, paper defines her blouse The stars test drive our hearts, wind daylilies into the body Beach holidays border on nutrition She talks like her body temperature is below normal Massage her like burnt oak, to build a fire of verbs Absent from her own soliloquies, she pleases precisely To be played with almonds, a bee playing cards Bet played fame by size plus attitude Threadless milk cake, an apartment in a meadow Dispersion, availability, flour spreads, firewood forecasts accuracy Flammability, five dreamings, five fingered death punch Five women wore the same dress, willow wished Spiked heels and eggrolls, seedpages Cut an orange into five quarters What is normal saline? A patient climbs the stairs: starfall stratosphere Antecedent consequence, crows fly, a cold front passes, unprocessed items Firearms as a collection of nouns

Process Note:

These poems began in 2011 with an investigation into John Cage’s adventures with chance. I was working at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and we had a small museum, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, with a regular exhibition called Reading Objects. The idea of the show is to explore and expand on what is traditionally said on those little cards next to paintings. So we were presented with an array of visual work, and could pick pieces to write about. I decided to write something to accompany a musical score by Cage that was to be part of exhibition. I wrote something, and I came to hate it. This poem was displayed next to Cage’s score. I felt I didn’t nearly go far enough with the poem to really engage with Cage. So I started again by researching Cage, and I also spent time with Jackson Mac Low’s Representative Works.

Around this time, I began to really notice and found myself entertained by the way search engines attempt to anticipate our needs. I began to slowly type lines of poetry (eventually working my way toward entire short poems) into the Google and Bing search boxes, and laugh my way through the list of wrongly anticipated results that appeared underneath my search. I began to make poems out of these (wrong) search results. At first, I thought I was adding chance into the poem, but I came to realize it was just the opposite: these search results came from the zeitgeist’s algorithmic desire, not my own, which ended up expanding the possibilities for the poem. The poetic “I” dissolves in this desire.

Lana Bella

Dear Suki: Number Twenty-Three

Dear Suki: Manggyeongsa Temple, 84', even as you kneel forward, the glow in in the air, too, kneels. You are all spine and fealty, a lotus bud in prostration, concave belly, covert eyes sift through pale languor of frankincense. Chiseled as a rhythm's resolve in restraint, you grew languid with prayers' cathedrals from cassock-throat to atonic fingers. Obscured by the lambent mist, I move against the susurration of devoted pith then out into the largess of magnolias and prunus trees. Here, wisdom turns its cheval glass downwards the veins of trunks and limbs, purer than rosary- hands searching absolution, its hymns a mystic life of brightness and shadows, speaking with the talk of relics in chained tongues.

Lana Bella

Dear Suki: Number Twenty-Six

Dear Suki: Kien Giang, March 21st, the end point is always the harvest of all forgotten things, whistling in dashes of your merchant grins and my nylon fishing net. As wild birds share our footprints in the sand, I rope on, gentling in my careful wing of muscle rank with sweat, while you rest a ghost of fingers where the sky meets my wiry bend, spreading skin upward and around to the sun. And I will grow taller in enterprise, from sternum to clavicle, breath by breath, lurch to a stop only at the change of seasons, ever ceasing. For it shall be then, caught in the gulfweed of the sea, I will know I had been floating there beside you like amoebas for decades.

D. E. Steward

Passchendaele

Dead serious, ponderously pessimistic, Emil Cioran’s flat dismissal of storytelling and the novel is almost humorous

In the vein of Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave (1944) and David Shields’ hip Reality Hunger (2010)

Strangely similar to the bristling New York School forties-and-fifties dogmatics celebrating abstract expressionism and scorning figuratism

Trade fiction’s present pell-mell confessional cast and brand-name lasciviousness enhances the argument

It’s commodification now

And tell-all memoirs

“Nothing makes any difference with whimsy. Whimsy is for low stakes” – Geoff Dyer

Confessional blogging could turn out to be the story telling of the era

If all literary forms eventually ossify into cliché, new forms are created only when writers are able to identify and expose the clichés

Perhaps all printed-word expression itself will ossify

The uniqueness of the endurance of the printed word undercut

Reverence for calfskin, marbling, heft, truth with silverfish isn’t going to be enough

Littera gone to digital image

Print on paper to become possibly only a minor alternative medium

Not only into cliché, but into trivial, confessional meaninglessness

Why libraries at all, when all you need is broadband

But monumental memorial research and presidential libraries still go up

Community libraries are the utilitarian ones

Book-hungry kids come to them, little kids with their mothers for picture books, maniac little readers who come and go with backpacks full, teenagers after school, jobless and congenitally idle people arrive to look up something, use the facilities, sit, doze

Condolanders prowling around for a break from TV, video games, boredom, ennui

Like people go to church, connecting to a civil place

Any public space other than the mall

Wannabe a doer, wannabe a be

Want to count for something, want to be known

Famously or contentiously

Like Emil Cioran

Who backed the Romanian fascist Iron Guard through the nineteen thirties and then ended up famous in France

In the extremes of his mega-pessimism, made his reputation with statements like, "Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure"

Uttering a few vitriolic “pshaws” a day slinging his hook in somebody else’s direction

And there’s nothing quite like fame in France

René Béhaine, 1880-1966, author of L’Histoire d’une Société in sixteen volumes (1904-1959), didn’t even make the later day Petit Larousse

Neither did Béhaine’s La Conquête de la Vie, published originally, in a burst of erudition at nineteen in 1899, as the first volume of his Histoire

Nothing to do with Béhaine or fame in France but notice the slick palindrome of Malayalam, a literary language of South India

Its region is the Malabar Coast tucked between the zones of two other most ancient Indian Dravidian languages, Kannada and Tamil

Like Sinhala in Sri Lanka and Telugo in Madras, that now is Chennai

Malayalam, from ancient Tamil in the sixth century, is spoken in Keralia

In Kochi (Cochin), Keralia’s big port

Ronald Ross an Anglo-Indian who won the Nobel in Medicine in 1902, determined the vectors of malaria transmission in Begumpett in the Sigur Ghat, a steep valley that leads out of the Nilgiri Hills, Tamil Nadu

Inland, just behind that coast

Deep in the marvels of hillscape South India

Asian remarkables everywhere from the Bosporus to the Pacific

Lafcadio Hearn found his Asia-sublime in Japan

He arrived in Matsue in western Honshu in 1890, d. Tokyo, 1904

Hearn’s “The Dream of a Summer Day,” the first chapter of Out of the East (Boston, 1895) is a dream in the way the best of twenty-first century imaginative prose is written

The Dream of a Summer Day, an Irish play about Hearn, was produced in 2005

Irish father, Greek mother, the United States and Martinique from Ireland for two decades before he decamped for western Honshu

In 1874 in Cincinnati, Hearn and Henry Farny, later a painter of Western Americana, ran nine issues of a small press magazine called Ye Giglampz

Hearn has long lost fame in America, has long been revered in Japan

Half a million plus people in Maçao, probably none of whom have more than local fame

Maçao has high humidity, high population density even by Asian standards, and baccarat

Macanese patacas (MOPs) are worthless anywhere else except China and Hong Kong

All systems pass

To catch the kinetics of the changing world remember to go from one collected note to the next and write through them

The segues are in the internal logic of how and when things were noted

Only write through the notes and do not write about them being notes to write from

The synechthry of ill-timed careers, incompatible housemates, strained marriages, bad neighbors, irrational mergers

Keep up, keep up, keep up

Buckminster Fuller’s icosaspheres, the mathematical term for his geodesic domes

Fullerenes, fullerides, buckyballs, buckytubes

Cleaver’s and Rubin’s hypocrisies and impacted sexism were as typical of the sixties as Bucky Fuller, the Jefferson Airplane, tie-dye, pot, love-ins, the Grateful Dead, and SNCC

Sex through power, the old story, the Crescentii clan ruled Rome from the middle of the tenth century through a string of popes, one was Pope John XII, famed for his pornocracy

And, following the interregnum of a Benedict, the next Crescentii was Pope John XIII

John XIII died of the same circumstances as Pope John XII, both murdered by the husbands of their lovers

No dogs howled when those two died

Perry Anderson’s vocabulary includes magma, taxative, lustration, censitary, carmagnoles, scoria, galumphery, alembicated, exapation, caducity, postilla, and the near archaisms of contemn, glozing, moiety, and brigade as a verb

He uses a mélange of foreign words and phrases, tat gratuity, salonfähig, glacis, cabotage, guerres en chaîne, signum rememorativum, déphasage, en toutes letters, chasses gardées, déconbres, in nuce, fin de non recevoir, plumpes Denken

Scabies, tinea, most of his exposed skin exanthematous, an altogether scrofulous person standing before the bar in night court in the Criminal Courts Building downtown

He copiously tattooed with mysterious sigils, she wore some of the same symbols in large pieces of jewelry, her hair blotchy henna red

Shia and Sunni, Israelis and Palestinians, Irish and Orangemen, dogs and cats

First Caracas morning, a rooster’s call cleared from the ground shadow dawn in one red, immaculate cry

Caracas, a runaway metropolis, spilling out of its mountain bowl in all directions

A monument to Tübingen’s Kindermörd at Langemarck (Ypres, 1914) stands in a glade at the lip of the Max Planck Institute’s hill above the Stadt

Adding to the myth, long a credo to the Nazis and nationalists, that in 1914 students and their professors marched singing into allied machine gun fire, some without rifles

By the Third Battle of Ypres, 1917, generally known as Passchendaele, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, the whiskey family, had fine-tuned his methods of mutual mass butchery

Passchendaele was the worst of all

Impassable mud and mustard gas, over half a million casualties at Passchendaele, more than three hundred thousand of them British

Or the Somme or perhaps Verdun, both with even more casualties

The German army used chlorine gas at Gravenstafel in the Second Battle of Ypres, 1915

Six thousand French troops died there in ten minutes

The Douaumont Ossuary at Verdun: skulls and a muddle of bones behind the glass

Up the Voie Sacrée from Bar-le-Duc

For Verdun many dogs howled

Arkava Das

As the mist of prayer lifts from one hand in a clasp to the other

Cautious Fourier, head muffled in the textile of the army at Lyon, under a sky the weakened neck of Novikov's mob of book-sellers, "men with the faces of angels", were they one? Or did the sail divide the passions, drawing them farther along the boom, till the earth was a fixed pupil, one never grudging a master? “In all that you say have you any other purpose except to disprove the being of the many?” The forest held up as a lantern or a swordfish placed across the raft of the body?

From each possible tent rose the murmur of choice, the a priori brew of humanity

Arkava Das

Again, the transparent stone of day

“I used to be quite nervous. Now I'm on a new track: I put an apple on my table. Then I put myself inside the apple. What peace!” (Henri Michaux)

For Michaux the worm, the apple was sustenance growing in the free air, unfettered by bells and the Ferris wheel, consciousness was the cupped hands of the sea, which he forgot when he stood by it, speared by swimmers in various stages of exhaustion, livid and bloodless to a bright red. A cascade turned back from the doorway to all flesh.

The organism in the evening, habitable, tide to an overheard sadness, aliquot to a show of hands, each eye.

The intoxication of a problem is connected to its insolubility in vitro. You see a skeleton grin if you are in a certain mood and even then with the most conscientious muscle memory. The problem for example of expressionism pitched against the tired forms of expression that breed us daily.

“I will keep swallowing my spit till I become a blunt end”

Arkava Das

“Circulation, the circular path” Calm -- the first word erupting in your self. And after that initial echo, nothing.

The voice that spoke to you is gone, is now again your own.

You start counting. A calm night, a calm never to abandon us, a calm I felt close to after years, a calm I could not convince to stay, a calm that poisons every commerce between me and others, a calm that hurries along every conversation, a calm made entirely of information about a calm without a forehead on a calm once circumnavigated on the back of ants driven out of a calm driven out of footsteps resting on a calm with matchstick arms. A calm a frisk search of calm.

If the stars were unchanging once, so was I.

just come back down next week

just back next come down week

j u s t

c o m e

b a c k

d o w n

n e x t

w e e k

I guess that I'll just come back down next week. Blank

Total coincidence -- Here we go -- There's no such thing -- I told you so.

Few days ago I see this movie by Les Blank. He did Blazing Saddles, right? That's Mel Blank, moron. Mel Brooks, not Blank. What's up, doc? Doc on the singer Leon Russell. It's thirty years old but just got released. What year is this? A Poem is a Naked Person, but they never explain the title. He's all about that white church sound, right? But was he trying to be black or is that just a Texas thing? He's from Oklahoma. Who? Leon Russell. You know why Texas doesn't fall into the Gulf? Two-thousand fifteen, dumbshit. 'Cause Oklahoma sucks!

Anyway a week before I saw it I read this thing, just came across it on the shelf, this little story where a missionary tells a jungle savage he should cover up his naked self. The savage says but you're uncovered too. The missionary says but that's my face, that's just my face. The savage says but our whole body is a face. The guy who tells the story says the moral of the story's that a poem's all face. What does that even mean? I know, what does that mean?

You guys use Facetime? I hate that shit. It creeps me out. Like it's not quite real. Exactly, right? Who said our truest faces are our driver's license photographs? Remember what that Asian girl said that time you fucked her and she thought you disrespected her on purpose? I forget exactly how. "You want me to lose face." That's it. So sad. Wait, what Asian girl? That was some heavy shit.

I used to know this guy, chemistry geek from Milwaukee, total Packer fanatic, fat slob but sharp as a tack, and we'd get stoned a lot and talk, talk shit, and we'd forget what we were talking about of course. Of course. Forget what we were talking about, so we set up a tape recorder, cassette recorder, to record ourselves when we lost track, but check this out. We set up a second recorder, the master tape. The master's on no matter what. It gets it all, gets all of it. You can hear two of him and two of me. We're listening to ourselves and going "oh, you said that" and "I remember now," but hearing two of each of us and on the master you can hear us laughing with ourselves. I found it, found the tape, a couple months ago. Just totally embarrassing. Un-spooled it and threw it away.

eff ey cee ee s p e l l s F A C E

Where do you guys want to eat? I wouldn't mind some decent enchiladas. I'm sick of Mexican food. Tex-Mex or Mexican? Either. Both. Can't we just get some normal food for once? It just now hit me. He made a movie about that blues guitarist from Houston. The one we saw that summer there. He's got that song about the boy who stutters until he sings. That's real. That really is a thing. There was that guy Mel Tillis. And then he didn't like the band and kicked them off the stage. Who? The blues guy. Lightning Hopkins. It's Lightnin'. What? No g: Lightnin'. Kicked them off, one by one. No one knew what was going on. I know the feeling. And then he broke a string and kept on playing anyway.

What festival was that again? Juneteenth. To celebrate that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed. It took time for the news to get there to the Gulf Coast slaves. Is that what that Stones song's all about? How come you dance so good? How come you taste so good. You're such an asshole. Just ignore him. I really wish I could.

A face expresses what the words the mouth says don't always say. Or says without saying them, or maybe not in words, in other words. Who said that? Each part matters just as much as each part does. As each other part does. There is no other part.

He said, "That's all right. Lightnin' don't need all the strings anyway." In that song the boy keeps stuttering so he says, "If you can't say it--"

Say that again, what you said before, about there is no other part. That's it. There is no other part.

"If you can't say it, just sing." And then that first long note, sustained.

Goes

It goes by month it goes by year So February their new year It goes according to the moon I'm March what month I'm May are you We're close then they got different Animals each month each year So you're an ox I'm Aries but I'm on the cusp this is the year The monkey yeah so that means you're The ram it goes by year I have An Oriental calendar A place mat at that restaurant That's right there where you exit Where you get off right there where Sure I've been there that exit where The access road goes by the lake

Give (near Houston)

The second one winged, it seemed, more for balance than for push when the skiddling toward it steadied from The first one, fifteen feet away at first and sitting still for several seconds after landing on the same chain-link's upper horizontal before it started toward The second, which lifted off and up a foot or so to a thin limb with give.

The first stayed still. The second stayed still, too, although the thin limb swayed with set-down in an arc of exponentially diminishing amplitude. The first stayed still.

The second went white to a second thin limb above, but not quite as far above, and a foot or two closer to, the first. The first went up. The second darted.

The first reversed direction it had come from Grey into thicker branchings away from. The second went diagonal away but not all

The way away. Gray-white grey-shadow flap Flashed something neither one but what. The first broke cover the second went toward.

Robyn Art

And Then There is New Jersey shoot at nothing—water, the hills. —“And Then There is California” Jennifer L. Knox

There are as many kinds of vanishing as there are relics from the Nineties (World music; cargo-loading;) in the virtual time capsule we built as kids and buried in the sand-choked woods of our deadbeat shore towns. Yea, we are but brief candles once you get past the crappy verisimilitude so hells yeah, let’s get takeout from the corner Wawa, let the kids troll the perimeter of the roped-off, lead-poisoned beach where people sit on benches, smoking, rocking vintage body mod or walking their pitbulls of a midsummer eve. There is nostalgia, there is the voice in the wilderness like a small fire, there is the plum-blossoms-fallingbut- generally-okay-with-it-feeling of wabi, and then there is New Jersey: minus a few centering breaths of that go-with-it feeling, part eternal comeback tour, part I Endured the Agonies on the Cross and All I Got Was this Lousy T-Shirt, less velvet rope, more police tape, half-blotto on the high-octane Cosmos of a rich friend of friend’s open-bar pool party (fuck yeah!) the sky still threaded with stars, the important stuff: is “Bigly” even a word? Is there even such a thing as the “opposite of a cheerleader?” I mean, for real? Robyn Art

Class of ’93

I rocked my Jessica Mclintock like nobody’s business.

Affected the hair and makeup of low-level aspiring newscasters.

Exchanged shout-out’s with the rachitic parking lot burnouts between their stints of gas-huffing and community service.

Opined nothing of cram schools, the nonfat mayo craze, the influx of displaced persons trawling the minimalls.

It was an Up-With-People moment but we were mostly drunk on Listerine and Enya, that decade pre-sedation dentistry and the widespread acceptance of neck tattoos.

We had few relations with the future, that malarial swamp, or with that woman, Monica Lewinsky.

We were the blackbird chillaxin’ and the moment just before.

Everything that would happen wasn’t happening yet. Robyn Art

The Thing About Flight

Although the hummingbird can fly up to 50 mph without crashing into stuff and certain frigate species can fly while their brains are half-asleep the human, like the sun, can go only so long without falling in on itself—part purgatory, part theme park, sometimes it’s enough to stroll the verdant copse without encountering some imploring figure or other, the sunset a mass of welts, a sky jettisoned of cloud. Things explode for a reason: meteorites, those sub-lunary has-been’s; the body’s wish-list of priors. Hit the rewind on the body cam, point to the appropriate face on the pain chart, record next to each letter what you think the mystery powder is. Dilapidated tonnage of some vision, some whorl, O beautiful hellacious, make of me a vessel. Robyn Art

The Opposite of Cheerleader

Another fall, another hurricane alert. Five years have past; five summers, with the length of five long winters! (The best part: visions. The worst: blood loss.) The past like a pair of custom wrestling tights cut away with the trauma sheers, like regret, dopey and totemic, the hushed and monophonic wind, (The President isn’t a cheerleader, he’s the opposite of a cheerleader!) like history—bifurcated, thorny, part Anti-Bias Dialogue, part Micro-Affirmation, your version, my version, And the tide rises, the tide falls. Jeff Harrison

Golden Rue

I gargantuan, they in the skies yet lower they to the ground with gold the moonless were golden -- me: blooded for thee a sight to enjoy, thee, Virginia, moonless thee if ape thinks of a palace, behold,-- at the very-most least an aviary for letters' newborn steeds!

I, more, I inched all drenched blooded for thee a sight to enjoy but glumly she bird then just die

Jeff Harrison

Sigmund Freud

Freud, Sigmund Freud, do corkscrew mine borrowers drift, you colossus, you collectible -- your lessons I handhold aspirators would congruent you -- lamentations had been lends & your brashy mouth! hourglass has dwellers! lacerated fantasy! their central skew had been your chasteness -- yours! much repaid was your eavesdropping! now you know even the quizmakers have dressmakers, formalism's attendees antiquated & insinuated falsehood was oscillated

Triceratops: their discreteness be blankness, T-Rex them craze they eat plants & scorn coins -- there is no dirtier infamy, Freud, but any reptile is subject to refinement, you hear? oh, oh, they are your counterpart's anvil, mightily sainthooded

Leslie Seldin

The Forest Spins With Us On a Planet

The forest spins with us on a planet. We are both dizzy for water.

Not everybody is everybody’s cup of tea. Forests can be needy until its too much and no one cares.

We pat the bark and feel closer.

Leslie Seldin

Far Outside a Snug Order

Turtles stretch themselves

Far outside their ken.

You see them watching you watching them, their shells several little hands wide.

Animal fingerprints are everywhere.

Imagine your torso set free.

The sky and its usual cycles.

Bruised days opened, then released. Leslie Seldin

Under Sky

Under sky rain makes itself into more rain. Every minute more dark seeds.

Rain can be itself and leave us dry. Our bodies move closer but we forget how. My body is a floating frame I can’t control.

Under a rug our history accumulates.

Two of us as one together alone. The morning is cold.

Red and pink blooms on bushes shiver and salamanders mysteriously disappear. something Hidden underground that emerges too soon.

It takes several errors to kill it.

Leslie Seldin

We Are Kindred

I look at my boss and his sad eyes and I see love in there. Not an easy love. A dark Scandinavian love that cries real tears nothing to do with me. We are kindred, drinking water chilled from a cooler. We stand like two tall birds, weary yet kind in a pale landscape.

I wear purple from Goodwill. Purple, a regal color. I make eye contact with no one.

I go home and reign over my shredder an insatiable box that feeds on my black words.

Sometimes a person can wear purple and speak quietly. Sometimes a bird can just fly away. Also love can die soon without ever knowing what it knows is so little. Leslie Seldin

They Do Not Stop Their Boisterous Pleasure

The pigeons on my windowsill are courting. They dance in circles. Their circles grow bigger.

They move so fast.

I am cowed. My body is a bag. I want the clouds and pigeons under my thumb.

I am a drunken suitor so needy and suitable. The moaning unhinges my human dreams inside my small bird body. I know how shaky a landscape can be.

How ground can slip away and clouds follow.

Leslie Seldin

Contents

I. The Adam's Needle II. The Babbling Thrush III. The Calgary Stampede IV. The Dag Boy V. The Eared Owl VI. The Fabian Principles VII. The Gadsbobs VIII. The Ha Ha Ha! IX. The (Iceland) Pony X. The Jaborandi XI. The Kai XII. The Lack-Wit XIII. The Macaroon XIV. The N.A.C.A. XV. The Oak of Jerusalem or Paradise XVI. The Pa'anga XVII. The Quai d'Orsay XVIII. The Radon Seed XIX. The Sac-Winged Bat XX. The T Account XXI. The U-bahn XXII. The Vinyl Score XXIII. The Wadcutter XXIV. The Xystus XXV. The Ya'hoodom XXVI. The Zap Gun

Mark Young

WCW: Collected Poems I

I will sing a joyous song, an idyl, they say to me, an idyl.

I will sing a joyous song, immortal, impromptu.

I will sing a joyous song in harbor, in San Marco, Venezia, in the 'Sconset Bus.

I will sing a joyous song in the inter- ests of 1926.

I will sing a joyous song, an invitation to we who live in this flat blue basin, an invitation to you who had the sense to add an invocation & conclusion.

I will sing a joyous song. It is a living coral, it is a small plant.

Item. I will sing a joyous song. Mark Young

A List for Tom Beckett

Vegan stigmata

The rheology of soft enjambment

Deliberate serendipity

Bondage dreams & Gilles Deleuze

The zombies fight back

I was a sex toy for the CIA

The neural pathways of desire

Death & the Countess

Vanishing pints of vanilla essence

Rightful indigestion

Is Dog Dead?

American Idolatry

Racine's raccoons

Vaginal aromatherapy

Mark Young

A line from Dr. John Dee

A peddler's cry on a chilly Istanbul night—the weaving calculator is back! Want to type a backslash? Want to read the value from a cube? Looking for a definition of dead space in an online Medical Dictionary? It's a far cry from the flavorless supermarket tomatoes typically found this time of year. No air drag, & a convenient portion of banquette seating in the back so the luminous fluxes can then be calculated as the illumin- ance decreases. Voting with a fork can only get you so far.

Raymond Farr

More or Less Abstract than My Name on a Mailbox

I walked six days—a ghost in a ring of black woods, my stomach full of radiator fluid. & I saw John Berryman—the space his death had made of him.

I remember the faces of six pale men I thought were staring back at me—broken thoughts of wild stain glass hair shooting from their scalps like St Elmo’s fire—the collective mind of the 20th C.

But how could I trust this? I thought everything I thought could be viewed on a screen, on a TV bigger than life in the glitz of Time Square.

& that people could see all of my thoughts. & that I knew this despite what people told me to the contrary.

My visions were flaming red snails. My shadow was a girl’s shadow, 16 yrs old, & cast in a ball of darkness on the floor. But I was a man, this stain of ink on the sunrise of my couch.

& I realized a dark stain of water on a dry rock wasn’t a dark stain of water on a real rock at all. & that metaphors only confused the situation.

& when I saw my own name—Henry Flowers—on the side of a mail box, I grew agitated. It was all wrong—Watusi is my real name & nothing can stop me!

Raymond Farr

The Things My Art Transforms

Once these little plaster moons adorned my good shoes—my uncle called them officious of me to wear. I was not a fascist. I walked in snow in them. I walked all summer in them with feet written like music the state couldn’t control. & no one told me it was forbidden. No one told me that holding onto the past, like someone with a grudge, would always prove pointless.

I was the boy in the white shirt pleading for his life. I specialized in deformed absolutes. I was reaching for my dad’s violin, one hand tied behind my back. I saw Warsaw kissing the grey water it called robin’s blood—& the gleam of death on the huge brass bell of the world & the way light fluttered in & out of the doomed kitchen windows of Antwerp.

& sitting in a blanket of white fog, death was something like the body & the mind of all the wrong words showing up at my school, telling me my father had died, & that my mother had sent them. It was like something smoldered in a bright field of memorized fish but I couldn’t remember what exactly.

& if I spoke—a boy fingered by shadows & walking a strange road… & if I reveled in the saw dust of a night covered in cypress, the dogs seemed monsters wheeling their giant heads around, licking the mad anal sex of my poems. They called me the boy with blue marrow. They called me kibble the dogs vomit up.

My voice was just a flowery grenade. I tossed it like my own name into a field of brilliant, red poppies—black dog turds aglow in the absurd blackness of the black things my art transforms. & people—drowsing in the narthex of an old church—half-sank in the dark film noir movies of my eyes. Incense still rises from their popcorn like a cry from my bed.

Raymond Farr

Dear Søren, In terms of plangent abominations A pittance is paid the calliope tender & sounds of a mother & daughter sopping wet & running from the rain—this droll annihilating darkness! Either my boots are chucked with mud & lack of sleep is pulling me under these yellow fever flowers Or the landing gear is down in words of absolute felicity Either I am Fab! Or I am Borg! Or where are my feet?

Raymond Farr

What Hangs on the Floor Once Carpeted the Wall

My brain waves & his resemble

Power systems In the ranch house

Of Damsel Flarf The red acrylic

Corpse hair Of men marking

Loans in default & so I paint

A man grabbing Eyes, the skull

The lost hours Are like that. I am

More than token I am back in fractured

SAMO’s arms The idea of a tire

Strangling my midriff But I never finish

That’s what purple is A stain more than

Reality, it terrifies I am the cross of

Black spray paint That Jesus carried

Arpine Konyalian Grenier

Four from Willed Capital

Dafted Blue

About when sentient turned sensible colors registered and we wasting the day after hope resorted dyadic outskirts the languid master levitation learned behavior surmises

spoiled love after a transient how the more I look at myself the more my left side crosses over that serves me an exploratory diaphragm never before spotted

I am past knowing these days I open like a book to be written all I have is a how

I eat my words the fend off

surveillance stehend all tell me.

As Impedance Causes

Prestige languaged next to the hitch of the vernacular as I stirred then steered want I have wished it a set of scars impede advice wheels eroded over time far from unwilling memories carnal love and obituaries

scored overheads maybe if I’d been unbuttoned or mother or rain or clown calligraphy maybe? the way it feels elsewhere is obsession fiscal backwash charged lake I pass by privately reckon whispers meadows hatcheries I return to the mainland and potted plants

don’t take me out yet inform the night and pierced ears approach nativities awhile rattle glow burn light money strapped smiles bypass the grin I feel safe with daily your empty hands at wind after a flower’s disturbance

let me abandon you for now

Spring and dreams have entered my body a peculiar insistence stages our story Alice Neel the rings of Saturn olir olmaz archaeology mannequins maybe later distance and minutes will dress them hives and gasps later parameters.

Seasoning, 2015

Feeling is to reason as mass is to gravity yet affect delivers somatic markers degrees and types dominante

trails against the sky feathered salt

nodding to surface as food is to be eaten and feelings are to be felt clarified into dawn the veteran night beauty radiates calmly prods and curbs just because there is the rational systematic but also the encoded mere heuristics historically implicated diaphragm metaphor and narrative groom so how hard would it be to forecast blank outcome how elusive to purport context

time efforts to control decisions start up and we at best emotional bodies after pulp social arrangement in and out of line gloves rooms gestures perfection my mistake eventually floor 1.2% GDP haunted I separate from

and I lick it for luck trace your reasoning portals seasoning relativity subtractions affect identity drives interest drives identity sensor monitor controller defined humidity humility disturbance

mother used to say I was loved as child light need not be useless to the blind I cast my emotional body over violations of determinism link it to forever

I tamper with plump destinations what is murder what is justice light or social plasma particles of word.

Unraveled Commit

What is said knowingly exhausts authorship Kepler rates its twin as Earth grates Kepler for cardinal recall because it needs carbon how final could that be? carbon dioxide quarks coming together to hadronize tree to alpha pinene to aerosol and cloud droplets contextualized for felicitous passage garden wind shadow valleys recognize

home news beyond the blue a synthetic chromosome related to yeast reveals emptiness to form natural silicon drifts tailored genome possibilities water in sand we slide over easier cryogenic systems ink our path the Elohim make room for repetition and error trap constraint to compensate for intrusion repression evasion definitions reusing quotes to elicit the theatrical self-crippling bastards we circuitously belabored hidden states contoured around syllables sound and mindset adjust blessing inadvertent demise the traditional sorry commiserated with fruit flies over alcohol hydrogen can be stored in formic acid we say sorry the dead are alive belatedly rated and ludic

how does one fund context after code then? though character feeds those who stutter it also leads the social life of words use and trajectory dictate being explicit with morals hunkers capital next to flesh and bone paints bird kinsfolk horse grooms the beast capital worth reputation abusive in likeness and we against the anxiety of influence settling cause behind mirrors storing goods for later in solitude.

Raphael P. Maurice

To Go To Hell For This, Love

At that greatest of all spectacles, that last and eternal judgment, how shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sages, philosophers, blushing in red-hot fires with their deluded pupils; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish then ever before from applause.. - Tertullian

As you lay across a fallen oak, I grew grateful, like many heartsick boys, to God. To my wizard who made this scene— the forest, the jewel-birds singing in rows, an owl’s green erudition haunting its perch. O, the ease when you, the dream, leapt into my lap. Your body an electric map, all for our roaming. Though some virgin-ghost does peer into our hell, & crosses out our country names— I was in love, & claimed that right.

Now, more than I care to mention, sleepless, you come again to purr, though my wife’s body stirs predictably near. Missing the ease of your sunlit hair— as I shuffle along, cleaved & wedded to the world. In dreams I breathe god-made fumes, lucky to sense the blaze that swallows whole.

Could you, nearest to me, measure what took place within our choir of a forest, when we finished, woke & let our bodies sing again?

Darren Demaree

A Damaged Thinker #82

I would like my fear to be notarized, so the court can have that question declared dead. I was never inclined to smile, nor swivel my intentions, but this borrowed time is too light to hold

& the weight appears to be the same as the first flame that found me.

Darren Demaree

A Damaged Thinker #83

You wouldn’t think much about crippling a pearl. I do. I do.

Darren Demaree

A Damaged Thinker #84

My view is a cave. I am a bear in the cave. When I get out of here,

I am going to consume the whole of the world & perform tricks with the intention-less bombers. I will never swallow fire, I have other plans for fire. When I get out of here, there will be no more thought.

Michael Basinski and Ginny O'Brien

Ghosts No. 1

Michael Basinski and Ginny O'Brien

Ghosts No. 2

Michael Basinski and Ginny O'Brien

Ghosts No. 3